Orange County Sanitation District

Transcription

1 Orange County Sanitation District The Orange County Sanitation District operates large wastewater treatment plants in Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach, CA. These plants treat about 230 million gallons of sewage every day enough sewage to fill up Anaheim Stadium three times. Content of wastewater streams Wastewater entering the OCSD treatment plants comes from three major sources: residential, commercial and industrial. As such, the waste stream mainly is composed of bathroom, kitchen and laundry wastes. And industrial operations from local shops and factories add various mixtures of chemical and cleaning wastes. The reasons sewage wastewater must be treated. plants like this one collect sewer water, remove most of the yucky contents and then discharge the cleaned water back into the environment. Wastewater must be treated like this because: It is yucky and foul It is filled with microorganisms that can cause disease and make us sick It can cause disastrous ecological impacts in the local environment In particular, untreated wastewater can spoil and disrupt natural habitats. For example, large amounts of untreated sewage can fill the water of coastal oceans with filth and cover the ocean bottom with it. This would expose local ecological communities to unusually high amounts of household and industrial chemicals. And the high organic content in the water can cause a depletion of dissolved oxygen in water in a condition called eutrophication. Eutrophication Eutrophication literally translates to mean, truly well fed. It is a condition of aquatic environments in which the oxygen in the water has been completely depleted. The oxygen is depleted because there is an overabundance of microbiological aquatic life that is engaged in consuming it from the water. There is an overabundance of aquatic life because there is an overabundance of food in the water. When untreated sewage is dumped into an aquatic environment like a lake or a river or an ocean, the sewage contains a great deal of organic material, mainly food wastes and toilet wastes. This organic material has high nutritional content that is exploited by microorganisms living in the receiving waters. As a result, plankton, bacteria and other small aquatic organisms feed on the sewage and their populations grow. The fixed carbon molecules in the sewage are taken in as food and are used to energize living operations through the process of cellular respiration Remember that cellular respiration consumes molecular oxygen Fixed carbon + O 2 CO 2 + H 2 O + biological energy (aerobic cellular respiration) As the population grows because of the overabundance of food in the sewage, more and more of the dissolved oxygen is removed from the water to support cellular respiration. But there is a limit. As dissolved oxygen continues to decline, there comes a point when there isn t enough to support the ongoing demands for cellular OCSD Fountain Valley, Environmental Biology Lab, Fullerton College 1

2 respiration. When that point is reached, the blossoming aquatic community of microorganisms dies for lack of enough oxygen in the water. This massive death, coupled with low oxygen levels in the water results in a new population explosion of a different kind an explosion of populations of anaerobic bacteria. Bacteria Photo source: Anlace at Wikimedia Commons, The term, anaerobic literally means without air. In biology, the term usually refers to a condition in which molecular oxygen is absent (without oxygen). The term is contrasted with the term, aerobic, which means with air, otherwise, a condition in which molecular oxygen is present. Almost every natural ecological environment you have ever seen is filled with aerobic organisms. These are organisms that use molecular oxygen in the cellular respiration. As the Earth s atmosphere is made up of 21% O2, living things are obliged to deal with oxygen as a matter of routine. But some kinds of living things cannot cope with molecular oxygen. These are the anaerobic organisms. To them, molecular oxygen is a poison; it disintegrates their molecules which halts all living operations. It kills them. Anaerobic organisms mainly are special kinds of bacteria that can only live in oxygenfree environments, such as the deep mud on the ocean bottom, or in the mud in the bottom of a pond or lake. Since anaerobic organisms cannot be exposed to free, molecular oxygen, certain aspects of their biochemistry are different from those of aerobic organisms. For example, in aerobic cellular respiration, molecular oxygen is used to collect waste hydrogens and waste electrons and in the process all are converted to H 2 O (water). But anaerobic bacteria use an alternate process and an alternate waste hydrogen collector. In straight fermentation, waste hydrogens are loaded onto carbon atoms to make molecules of methane (CH 4 ). Fixed carbon CH 4 + CO 2 (fermentation) In an alternate example, anaerobic organisms might use nitrate or sulfate salts (instead of O 2 ) to collect hydrogen wastes. When anaerobic organisms use nitrate salts (NO 3 - ) in an alternative form of cellular respiration called nitrate respiration or denitrification, molecular nitrogen (N 2 ) is returned to the atmosphere and CO 2 and water are produced as well. Overall, this is a good thing for all ecosystems as none of the products are toxic, and molecular nitrogen is once again available to help build new life. Fixed carbon + HNO 3 N 2 + H 2 O (denitrification) When anaerobic organisms use sulfate salts (SO 4 2- ) in an alternative form of cellular respiration called fermentation, the waste hydrogens are attached to sulfur to make hydrogen sulfide, and CO 2 and water are produced. Generally, hydrogen sulfide is toxic to aerobic organisms. This is one of the main problems that accompany the shift from an aerobic environment to an anaerobic environment. The production of hydrogen sulfide can significantly stress or directly kill any lingering aerobic organisms in the area. Fixed carbon + H 2 SO 4 H 2 S + CO 2 + H 2 O (fermentation and sulfate reduction) In summary, eutrophication is an undesirable environmental condition because it results in: the depletion of dissolved oxygen the production of toxic biochemical products the death of much of the normal aerobic flora and fauna OCSD Fountain Valley, Environmental Biology Lab, Fullerton College 2

3 Processes The treatment processes at a modern wastewater treatment plant contain, control and accelerate the natural physical and biological processes that normally happen to sewage waste streams. Instead of just letting these natural processes happen out in nature, the treatment plant operations carefully channel the wastewater stream into a series of tanks. As the waste stream moves from one tank to the next, natural physical and biological processes act on the water, gradually cleaning it. Preliminary Preliminary treatment is the first step. The sewer water entering the plant often has trash and other large physical objects. These objects are not treatable and must be removed so they don t clog up the rest of the system. Screens are used to filter out the largest of these objects. Next, the wastewater flows into grit chambers. Here, smaller, untreatable solids such as egg shells and sand settle out. The trash from the screens and the collected grit are then placed in dump trucks and sent to a landfill for disposal. Preliminary treatment screens Advanced Primary Primary treatment settling tanks This is a purely physical process, no biology happening here. After the screens, the waste stream moves to the primary settling tanks. Settling tanks occur at different sections of the process. The purpose of settling tanks is to let natural buoyancy act on solids in the water, letting light stuff float to the top and letting dense stuff sink to the bottom. In the primary settling tanks, skimmers at the top and scrapers on the bottom remove these solids which are then sent to the digesters for biological processing. More OCSD Fountain Valley, Environmental Biology Lab, Fullerton College 3

4 The waste stream water from advanced primary treatment then goes to secondary treatment. OCSD treatment plant # 1 splits this waste stream into two paths of secondary treatment. One path leads to trickling filtration. The second path leads to the activated sludge aeration tanks. Trickling Filtration This is mainly a biological process. Water is trickled over a 3-dimensional plastic matrix. A microbial biofilm that resides on the surfaces of this matrix uses the organic content as a source of food. The microbes consume much of the organic content in the water, thereby substantially reducing it. Trickling filter tank Trickling filter media Image source: BIOdek Once the water passes through the trickling filter tanks, it is channeled into circular settling tanks. Solids are skimmed from the top and scraped from the bottom and sent to the digesters. treatment settling tanks Image source: FEMA. Public domain Activated sludge aeration tanks Activated Aeration Tanks The other alternate form of secondary treatment at OCSD. This is mainly a biological process. Water from the advanced primary treatment tanks is sent to the activated sludge aeration tanks. Here, the water is stirred and air is injected. In addition, colonies of aerobic bacteria (called floc) are added. The bacterial colonies go through their life cycles and consume the vast amount of organic content in the waste stream. After the aeration tanks, the treated water enters linear settling tanks. Here, the remaining floc is skimmed off the top and sent back to the aeration tanks. Heavy solids are scraped off the bottom and sent to the digesters. OCSD Fountain Valley, Environmental Biology Lab, Fullerton College 4

5 Disinfection This is mainly a chemical process. Water from both streams of secondary treatment undergoes disinfection in order to kill all remain microorganisms. The OCSD plant mixes chlorine bleach into the waste stream to complete this task. Release of Treated Water Treated Water has three possible destinations: 1. Coastal groundwater injection. Treated water is injected into deep wells along the coastal region of north Orange County. Injection of this water acts to form a fresh water underground barrier. This barrier blocks the movement of salty groundwater from the ocean, and keeps it from creeping underneath continental Orange County. This prevents the contamination of drinking water wells by salty groundwater. 2. Offshore ocean discharge. Treated water is sent by pipeline several miles offshore. At the end of the pipeline, holes in the pipes allow the water to seep out and gradually mix with ocean water. 3. Orange County Water District. Some of the treated water is sent to the Orange County Water District plant adjacent to OCSD. There, the water undergoes tertiary treatment. From there, the water is shipped by pipeline to north Orange County where it is used to fill recharge basins. The water in the recharge basins percolates downwards and mixes with the larger groundwater reservoirs that underlie north Orange County. From there, the water is pumped up by drinking water wells and used again. Digestion digester composting, and soil amendments for non-food crops. This is mainly a biological process. Solids from all primary and secondary operations are sent to large digester tanks. Here, anaerobic bacteria consume much of the organic contents using anaerobic pathways, mainly fermentation. While consuming the sludge, fermentation processes produce large amounts of methane gas (CH4). This gas is collected and used to power on-site electrical generators. After spending days in the digesters, the watery sludge is then sent to a dewatering facility. There, most of the water is pressed out and the pasty remains are loaded onto dump trucks. The trucks take the dewatered sludge to out-of-state facilities that use it for dewatering presses. Large engines burn methane from digesters to generate electricity. OCSD Fountain Valley, Environmental Biology Lab, Fullerton College 5

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